Former BP exec's ex-husband gets prison for insider trading after eavesdropping on her calls

• Texas resident Tyler Loudon was sentenced to two years in prison for securities fraud related to insider trading on shares of TravelCenters of America.
• Loudon bought that stock after hearing his wife, then a mergers and acquisitions manager at oil giant BP, on work calls discuss BP's planned purchase of the company.
• He agreed to forfeit the more than $1.7 million in profit he made from TravelCenters shares after their price soared when the deal was announced.

The ex-husband of a former BP mergers and acquisitions manager was sentenced to two years in federal prison for insider trading that netted him $1.76 million after he eavesdropped on her work calls about the oil giant buying another company.

The ex-husband, Tyler Loudon, also was sentenced to one year of supervised release after his prison term and fined $10,000 by U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake in Houston on Monday.

Loudon's lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, asked Lake to sentence him to one year of home confinement followed by two years of supervised release, citing, among other reasons, the need to care for Loudon's ailing mother.

The prison sentence was at the bottom end of the 24-to-30-month range requested by federal prosecutors.

Loudon, as part of his guilty plea to a charge of securities fraud in February, already had agreed to forfeit the illicit profit he made in February 2023 from selling off the nearly 46,500 shares of TravelCenters of America after that company's stock price soared more than 70% on news it was being acquired by BP for about $1.3 billion.

The 42-year-old Houston resident, who was an engineer for an oil and gas company, bought TravelCenters shares for about $2 million over several months beginning in December 2022.

His purchases started after